February 2011
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That’s not to say plenty of women don’t have what it takes, but an assertiveness double standard exists. A man who is self-assured and outspoken is often considered strong and simply doing what a man’s got to do, but a woman of the same ilk is bitchy, demanding, and pushy. Where a man is tough, a woman has a lot of nerve. I’ve wondered if there are fewer female critics in prominent publications not because we aren’t out there, but in part because the combination of ambition, intelligence, and audacity does not always work in a woman’s favor.
by
Alizah Salario
The literary magazine has long had a reputation for its fleeting existence -- here today for issue 1, gone tomorrow by issue 3. But is that really true? And does the literary journal’s tiptoe along the precipice of failure differ from what other types of magazines face? The answer might surprise you. Literary magazines do just as well, or just as badly, surviving as long as so-called popular magazines for general readerships.
by
Daniel Nester and Steve Black
Except that it turns out that logic, too, is hardly solid or straightforward. It turns out that even prose stylists and math people can only create animals that exist in several animals simultaneously, animals that have hearts huge enough to contain time’s catastrophes. It turns out that no one can create anything as solid as a rock, because rocks aren’t actually solid.
by
Elizabeth Bachner
"Some things are definitely there, and definitely real. I’m real, and you’re real, and instead of ignoring you in the pursuit of some mythical Answer, maybe I’d be happier actually talking to you and finding some common ground between us. Maybe that would help me to understand myself a little better, and to feel less alone. And if I felt less alone, maybe I’d be readier to accept the randomness and the chaos and the uncertainty of the everyday."
by
Michele Filgate
"Certainly I look at writers who are able to sort of quit all their day jobs and really make a living as a writer, and say, 'Wow, that’s fabulous, we’d all like to be so lucky,' but I’m not really willing to give up a lot of the other things. I want to go to Kenya for a month and not write anything while I’m there. I want to pick up my kids at two-thirty instead of having a nanny do it, and not necessarily be writing while they’re home and I’m helping them with their homework."
by
Charles Blackstone
"I wanted it to be a warm and tender and poignant celebration of growing up in a time and place with a real sense of time and place, but with a universal feeling. ... I didn’t want to tell a dark tale, I wanted to tell a warm and funny one. You know, this was inspired by Proust, goddamnit. Proust and Public Enemy."
by
Margaret Howie
He wants life to admit that it’s about change. I’d like to establish a tenuous relationship between change and freedom, and to suggest that art is a way of exploring change.
by
Ben Greenman
"Looking back, I still marvel ... that I made it through the peritonitis that truly ought to have killed me, not to mention the many follow-up surgeries required to bring me back to the full health I now very gratefully enjoy. This seemed a questionable prospect when I was in the middle of my deathly illness, and so I was forced into the unusual position of trying to sum up a literary life that could have been cut short of what I’d always hopefully imagined would take place over a longer arc of time."
by
Jedediah Berry
"Listen, I got 24 rejection letters for my first book -- which still sits on my shelf, published by Kinko’s. There were only 20 publishers at the time; I got 24 rejection letters, which means some people are writing to you twice to make sure you get the point. ... I believe that you should never let anyone tell you 'no.'"
by
Grace Bello
For all that I feel quieted and calmed by time in the natural world -- observing baboons on the Kenyan savanna, gazing at buffalo in Yellowstone National Park, or just hanging outdoors with our rescued cats -- I often feel restless and jumpy when reading about nature.
by
Barbara J. King
"Isn't it that way for all of us, that we either accept our situations or change them? I'm an optimist in my actual life, so maybe my poor characters get the doom-and-gloom side of me. In fact, I'm sure that's true. My father always tells me to kill off more of my characters, which I don't do, but I do make bad things happen to them, even if on a small scale."
by
Michele Filgate
"I can’t resist the urge to make poems. And I suspect, like a lot of poets, something maybe has gone wrong somewhere in the history of us, and poetry might be the only field in which to address what demands attention but makes little sense."
by
Elizabeth Hildreth
"My writing process is a little like a trance state using found material and found text to activate my unconscious/subconscious creativity. I'm interested in narrative but ambivalent toward traditional or conventional narrative structures. I have always liked stories and storytelling, but I've never felt that most narrative writing reflects the real lived life."
by
Kate Greenstreet
"I’ve always loved ghost stories -- I loved
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir -- and all of my books contain light touches of magic. This is really no different. Secretly, I’ve always wanted to write ghost stories! I’m not sure I believe in ghosts in real life. I’m open-minded. Anything is possible. We live in a fascinating, mind-boggling universe."
by
Terry Hong
"I have recently hit upon the idea that no matter what mode or form of writing I am working in, I am finally working to appropriate and transfigure the rhythms of consciousness, of being -- the rhythms of my organs and the rhythms of the cosmos."
by
Robert Lopez